Of all this — the continuing arguments on the bridge, the absence of an adequate number of escort vessels, and the increased icing over of everything on the upper deck — the antiaircraft guns had become inoperable — Mother remained oblivious. She recalled that after the “Führers speech” she received from Nurse Helga five pieces of zwieback and a bowl of rice pudding with sugar and cinnamon. From the nearby Bower the groaning of the critically wounded could be heard. Fortunately the radio was playing dance music, “cheerful tunes.” She fell asleep to the sound. No contractions yet. After all, Mother thought she was in her eighth month.
The Gustloff was not alone as it steamed along at a distance of twelve nautical miles from the Pomeranian coast. The Soviet submarine S-13 was following the same course. The submarine had waited in vain in the waters near the embattled port city of Memel, along with two other units of the Baltic Red Banner Fleet, for ships departing or bringing reinforcements to the remnants of the German 4th Army. For days nothing came into view. While he waited, the captain of 5-/J may have been brooding over the impending court-martial and the interrogation he would have to undergo at the hands oft the NKVD.
When Aleksandr Marinesko received word over the radio in the early morning hours of 30 January that the Red Army had captured Memel's port, he issued an order for a new course without informing his central command. While the Gustloff was still docked at the Oxhöft quay, taking on a few more batches of refugees — now the Pokriefkes came on board — S-13, with forty-seven men and ten torpedoes, made for the Pomeranian coast.
While in my report two boats are coming closer and closer but nothing decisive has happened yet, an opportunity offers itself for taking note of routine conditions in a Graubünden penal institution. On that Tuesday, as on every workday, the prisoners were sitting at their looms. By this time the murderer of the former Nazi Landesgruppenleiter Wilhelm Gustloff had served nine years of his eighteen-year sentence. With the war situation now radically altered — since the Greater German Reich no longer represented a threat, he had been transferred back to Sennhof Prison in Chur — he thought the moment had come for submitting a request for clemency; but it was rejected by the Swiss Supreme Court around the time of the ships' maneuvering in the Baltic. It was not only David Frankfurter but also the ship named after his victim that found no mercy.
* * *
He says my report would make a good novella. A literary assessment with which I can't concern myself. I merely report the following: on the day that Providence, or some other calendar maker, had selected as the ship's last, the downfall of the Greater German Reich had already been rung in. Divisions of the British and American armies had entered the area around Aachen. Our remaining U-boats sent word that they had sunk three freighters in the Irish Sea, but along the Rhine front, pressure on Colmar was growing. In the Balkans, the partisans around Sarajevo were becoming more aggressive. The 2nd Mountain Troop Division was withdrawn from Jylland in Denmark to reinforce sections of the eastern front. In Budapest, where supply problems were worsening from day to day, the front ran directly below the castle. Everywhere dead bodies were left behind, on both sides. Identification tags were collected, decorations handed out.
What else happened, aside from the fact that promised miracle weapons failed to appear? In Silesia, attacks near Glogau were repulsed, but around Posen the fighting intensified. And near Kulm, Soviet units crossed the Vistula. In East Prussia the enemy advanced to Bartenstein and Bischofswerder. Up to this day, which was nothing special in itself, the authorities had managed to get sixty-five thousand people, civilian and military, onto boats in Pillau. Everywhere monument-worthy heroic deeds were performed; others were in the offing. As the Wilhelm Gustloff on its westward course was approaching the Stolpe Bank, and the submarine S-13 was still prowling for prey, eleven hundred four-engine enemy bombers conducted a night raid on the area around Hamm, Bielefeld, and Kassel, and the American president had already left the United States; Roosevelt was on his way to Yalta, the conference site on the Crimean peninsula, where the ailing man would meet with Churchill and Stalin to pave the way for peace by drawing new borders.
On the subject of this conference and the subsequent one in Potsdam, which took place when Roosevelt was dead and Truman president, I found hate pages on the Internet and a sort of throwaway comment on my know-it-all son's Web site: “This is how they dismembered our Germany,” along with a map of the Greater German Reich, with all the lost territories marked. He then speculated on the miracles that might have occurred if the young sailors, almost finished with their training, had safely reached their destination of Kiel on the Gustloff and been successfully deployed, manning twelve or more U-boats of the new, fabulously fast and almost silent XXIII Class. His wish list bristled with heroic deeds and special victory announcements. Konny didn't go quite so far as to invoke the final victory retroactively, but he was sure that these young U-boatmen would have experienced a better death, even if these miracle vessels had been destroyed by depth charges, than proved their lot when they drowned wretchedly opposite the Stolpe Bank. His opponent David agreed with the comparative weight assigned to these ways of death, but then tossed some reservations into the Net: “Those young fellows really had no choice. No matter what, they had no chance of surviving to adulthood…”
Photos are available, collected over decades by the pursers assistant after he survived the disaster: many small passport-sized ones and a group photo showing all the sailors who would normally have undergone four months of training with the 2nd Submarine Training Division. They are lined up on the sundeck, having saluted Lieutenant Commander Zahn and now, after the command “At ease!” standing there in a more relaxed posture. On this wide-angle photograph, showing over nine hundred sailor hats, which get smaller and smaller toward the stern, individual faces can be made out only as far back as the seventh row. Behind that an orderly mass. But from the passport-sized photos, one uniformed man after another gazes out at me. These youthful faces, although they may all be different, have the same unfinished quality. They must be about eighteen. Some boys, photographed in uniform during the final months of the war, are even younger. My son, seventeen by now, could be one of them, although, because of his glasses, Konny would hardly have qualified for submarine duty.
They are all wearing their admittedly becoming sailor caps, with the band that reads german navy at a cocky angle, usually tilted toward the right. I see round, narrow, angular, and chubby-cheeked faces on these death candidates. Their uniform is their pride and joy. They gaze out at me, their solemnity prophetically appropriate for this last photograph.
The few photos available to me of the 375 girls of the naval auxiliary make a more civilian impression, in spite of their little two-pointed service caps, also worn at an angle, with the imperial eagle bent around the point at the front. The young girls' neat hairdos — many no doubt achieved by means of permanent or water waves — fall in the curls fashionable at the time. Quite a few of the girls may have been engaged, only a few married. Two or three, who make a coolly sensuous impression on me with their straight hair, remind me of my ex-wife. That is how Gabi looked back in the day when she was a fairly dedicated education student in Berlin and made my heart drop to my knees the moment I saw her. At first glance almost all the naval auxiliaries are pretty, even cute; some of them show early signs of a double chin. They have a less solemn expression than the boys. Each one gazing out at me smiles unsuspectingly.
Because not even a hundred survived of the far more than four thousand infants, children, and youths aboard the doomed ship, only a few photos turned up; the refugees' baggage, with family photo albums from East and West Prussia, Danzig, and Gotenhafen, went down with the ship. I see the children's faces from those years. Girls with braids and bows, the boys with hair slicked down, parted on the left or right. There are hardly any pictures of infants, who in any case have a timeless appearance. The photographs of mothers who found their grave in the Baltic and of the few who remai
ned alive, mostly without their children, were “snapped” (as Mother would say) either long before the disaster or many years later on family occasions; of Mother there is not a single photo from that era — or of me as a baby.
By the same token, no likeness remains of those old men and women — Masurian peasants, retired civil servants, merry widows, and tradesmen — the thousands of elderly people, distraught from the horrors of their flight, who were allowed on board. All men in their middle years were turned back on the Oxhöft dock because they were eligible for the last Landsturm call-ups. Among those saved from going down with the ship, thus, were hardly any men or women of advanced years. And no picture preserves the memory of the wounded soldiers from the Kurland who lay packed onto cots in the Bower.
The few older people who were rescued included the ship's captain, Petersen, a man in his mid-sixties. At nine o'clock in the evening all four captains were standing on the bridge, arguing over whether it had been right to carry out Petersen's order and set running lights, an order given merely because shortly after six that evening a convoy of minesweepers had been reported by radio to be approaching in the opposite direction. Zahn had opposed the move. The second navigation captain likewise. Petersen did allow some of the lights to be turned off, but kept the port and starboard lights on. With only the torpedo boat Löwe serving as an escort, and with no lights indicating its height or length, the darkened ship continued on course through diminishing snowfall and heavy swell, approaching the Stolpe Bank, marked on all nautical maps. The predicted moderate frost registered — 8 °Celsius.
We are told that it was the first officer of the Soviet U-boat S-13 who spotted running lights in the distance. Whoever reported the sighting, Marinesko promptly made his way to the tower, as the submarine moved along above water. Apparently he was wearing, along with his fur-trimmed cap, or ushanka, not the lined coat that was standard issue for U-boat officers but instead an oil-smeared sheepskin slung over his shoulders.
During the boats long underwater cruise, which was powered by its electric engines, the captain had received reports only of sounds from small ships. Near Hela he had given the order to surface. The diesel engines came on. Only now did a ship with twin propellers become audible. Heavy snow that set in suddenly protected the submarine, but reduced visibility. As the snow subsided, the outlines of a troop transport, estimated at twenty thousand tons, and an escort vessel came into view. The submarine was on the ocean side, looking toward the transports starboard side and the Pomeranian coastline, whose presence could be dimly sensed. For the time being nothing happened.
I can only speculate as to what induced the captain of S-13 to increase the boat's speed and, still above the surface, circle the ship and its escort from behind and then try to find an attack position on the coastal side, in water less than thirty meters deep. According to later explanations, he was determined to strike, wherever he could find them, the “fascist dogs” who had treacherously attacked his fatherland and devastated it; up to now he had not had much luck.
For two weeks his search for prey had yielded nothing. He had not got off a single shot, either near the island of Gotland or in the Baltic harbors of Windau and Memel. Not one of the ten torpedoes on board had left its tube. Marinesko must have been starved for action. Besides, this man whose competence manifested itself only at sea must have been haunted by the fear that if he returned empty-handed to port in Turku or Hangö, he would be immediately hauled before the court-martial that the NKVD had called for. The charges were not limited to his most recent drinking bout and the overstayed shore leave he had spent in Finnish whorehouses; he was also under suspicion of espionage, an accusation common in the Soviet Union since the mid-thirties as the pretext for purges, and impossible to refute. All that could save him was an incontrovertible success.
After almost two hours on the surface, the U-boat had accomplished its circumnavigation maneuver. S-13 was now sailing parallel to the enemy vessel, which to the astonishment of the tower crew had running lights lit and was not tacking. Since it had completely stopped snowing, there was a risk that the clouds might part, leaving not only the huge transport and its escort ship exposed in the moonlight but also the U-boat.
Marinesko nonetheless adhered to his decision to launch an above-water attack. An advantage for S-/J, which no one on the submarine could have guessed, was that the U-boat locater on the torpedo boat Löwe was frozen and unable to pick up any echoes. In their account, the English authors Dobson, Miller, and Payne assume that the Soviet commander had been practicing surface attacks for a long time because German submarines had had great success with this method in the Atlantic, and now he wanted a chance to try it out. An above-water attack provides better visibility, as well as greater speed and precision.
Marinesko now gave an order to reduce buoyancy until the body of the boat was underwater, leaving only the tower poking out of the choppy sea. Allegedly a signal flare was seen coming from the bridge of the target vessel shortly before the attack, and light signals were spotted; but none of the German sources — the accounts of the surviving captains — confirm this report.
Thus S-13 approached the port side of the target vessel unimpeded. On instructions from the commander, the four torpedoes in the bow were set to strike at three meters below the surface. The estimated distance to the target was six hundred meters. The periscope had the ships bow in its crosshairs. It was 2304 hours Moscow Time, precisely two hours earlier German Time.
But before Marinesko s order to fire is issued and can no longer be retracted, I must insert into this report a legend that has been passed down. Before S-13 left Hangö Harbor, a crew member by the name of Pichur allegedly took a brush and painted dedications on all the torpedoes, including the four that were now ready to be fired. The first read for the motherland, the torpedo in tube 2 was marked for stalin, and in tubes 3 and 4 the dedications painted onto the eel-smooth surfaces read FOR THE SOVIET PEOPLE and FOR LENINGRAD.
Their significance thus predetermined, when the order was finally issued, three of the four torpedoes — the one dedicated to Stalin stuck in its tube and had to be hastily disarmed — zoomed toward the ship, nameless from Marinesko s point of view, in whose maternity ward Mother was still asleep, lulled by soft music on the radio.
While the three inscribed torpedoes are speeding toward their target, I am tempted to think my way aboard the Gustloff. I have no trouble finding the last group of naval auxiliary girls to embark, who were billeted in the drained swimming pool, also in the adjacent youth hostel area, used originally for members of the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls when they were sent on holiday cruises. The girls sit and lie there, packed in tightly. Their hairdos are still in place. But no more laughter, no more easygoing or sharp-tongued gossip. Some of the girls are seasick. There and throughout the corridors of the other decks, in the former reception rooms and dining rooms, is the smell of vomit. The toilets, in any case far too few for the mass of refugees and navy personnel, are stopped up. The ventilation system is not powerful enough to draw off the stench along with the stale air. Since the ship got under way, all the passengers have had orders to wear the life jackets that were handed out earlier, but because of the increasing heat many people are stripping off their warm underwear and also their life jackets. Old folks and children are whining plaintively. No more announcements over the public address system. All sounds subdued. Resigned sighing and whimpering. What I picture is not a sense of impending doom but its precursor: fear creeping in.
Only on the bridge, with the worst of the conflict resolved, was the mood reportedly somewhat optimistic. The four captains thought that having reached the Stolpe Bank, they had put the greatest danger behind them. In the first officers cabin a meal was being consumed: pea soup with ham. Afterward, Lieutenant Commander Zahn had the steward pour a round of cognac. It seemed appropriate to drink to a voyage on which Fortune was smiling. At his masters feet slept the German shepherd Hassan. Only Captain Weller was on watc
h on the bridge. Meanwhile time had run out.
From childhood on, I have heard Mothers often repeated formulation: “The first time it went boom I was wide awake, and then it came again, and again…”
The first torpedo hit the bow of the ship far below the waterline, in the area where the crew quarters lay. Any crew member who was off watch, munching a hunk of bread or sleeping in his bunk, and survived the explosion, nonetheless did not escape, because after the first report of damage Captain Weiler ordered the automatic closing of the watertight doors, sealing off the forward part of the ship, to prevent the vessel from sinking rapidly at the bow; an emergency drill in closing the watertight doors had been conducted just before the ship put out to sea. Among the sailors and Croatian volunteers thus sacrificed were many who had been drilled in loading and lowering the lifeboats in an orderly fashion.
What took place — suddenly, gradually, finally — in the closed-off forward portion of the ship no one knows.
Mothers next utterance also made an indelible impression: “At the second boom I fell out of bed, that's how bad it was…” This torpedo from tube 3, whose smooth surface carried the inscription for the soviet people,” exploded beneath the swimming pool on E deck. Only two or three girls from the naval auxiliary survived. Later they spoke of smelling gas, and of seeing girls cut to pieces by glass shards from the mosaic that had adorned the front wall of the pool area and by splintered tiles from the pool itself. As the water rushed in, one could see corpses and body parts floating in it, along with sandwiches and other remains of supper, also empty life jackets. Hardly any screaming. Then the light went out. These two or three naval auxiliaries, of whom I have no passport-sized photos, managed to escape through an emergency exit, behind which a companion-way led steeply up to the higher decks.
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